Excuse Me

I love this time of year. Football — high school, college, and pro — is cranking up and I love listening to coaches. Granted, a lot of them get bad press every year, but a lot of football coaches tend to be blunt, focused, and not hesitant to offer life lessons.

Recently, I heard a coach say, “An excuse is an excuse.”

A couple of dictionaries and the Internet define an excuse as, “A reason or explanation put forward to defend or justify a fault or offense.”

Read that again: An excuse is an explanation defending a fault or offense … not a defense of something positive that went awry.

Remember the truism, “No good deed goes unpunished”? Or the life philosophy, “I’d rather ask forgiveness than ask permission”?

Let’s be honest, an excuse is used when you didn’t do something you should have done.

And the coach I heard was simply echoing every coach who ever lived; an excuse is an excuse. You didn’t get it done.

I’m guilty, too. I’ve worked up some excuses lately that sounded reasonable to me, but when I trotted them out I could see and hear how lame they were. I didn’t get it done.

What are you making excuses for?